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Flowers
Flowers by Tova. 1994
Tova Berlinski
Bouquets of Lamentation
Gideon Ofrat |
Flowers
In our zionistic liberalism we have attributed a celestial guardian to all the plants, which in the 30's has even been most cordially illustrated by Shmuel Harubi. Western culture has been less generous and has chosen flowers to pay tribute to the gods, or moreover, the goddesses. There was Chloris in Greece and Flora in Rome. Both have been identified with spring blossom. Chloris had been married to Zephir, the wind of spring from the west which fertilizes the flowers. No wonder that Nicolas Poussin painted Flora dancing in the garden and dispersing flowers. Or Rembrandt who painted his beloved wife Saskia in the image of Flora. We have learned that painting of a woman carrying flowers in her arms, a frequent subject in art history, is a direct or indirect transfiguration of the spring goddess. Flora.
The flower is an intrinsic part of Western man's field of imagination, the man drawn towards the "blue flower" (Novalis), towards the black tulip or the sun-flower. The semantic meaning of flower - stemming from the verb "to flow ", glide , underlies the symbolism. Flower, accordingly, implies beauty, life, sensuality: The rose of Eros by Lorka, the honeydew of love flowers of "Midsummer Night's Dream".... The flower is our optimistic answer to the rifle, a gift to the beloved, crowning the heads of the celebrating ones, a bouquet for the bride on her wedding day, lilium from the angel to Maria on the Day of Annunciation. Indeed, a flower will grow out of the grave, a narcissus will blossom out of the swamp, a crysanthemum will arise out of the burning castle (Strindberg), a sun- flower will blossom out of the shoulder of a dying soldier (from an earlier version of Picasso's "Guernica"). Unforgettable is Picasso's teaching relating to a sensual woman's presentation as a flower: The flower is life, it is happiness, it's the messenger of redemption. The Occident (the orient came first with its symbolism of lotus, jasmin and cherry blossoms) has been largely occupied with the flower, be it by fixing it in the hair or in the buttonhole, or by painting it as a burning sunflower in Aries or as a charming water-lily in Giverny. In Western culture the carnation signifies love, the daisy is a symbol of , the lilac and the iris symbolize virginity, the rose stands for victory and the violet is a symbol naivety for modesty... However, the flowers of life knew the answer of the flowers of death. Even prior to "Les Fleurs de Mal" by Baudelaire, or the flower bouquets by Odilon Redon, the allegoric Dutch painters of the 16th century, taught us about the withering and dying flower's symbolism of the vain pleasures of life and its finality. A more modern Dutch painter, Mondrian, has presented the development of human life through the light of a blossoming and a withering crysanthemum. This duality has been given expression by many other well-known artists. The artist Rubin, who painted the Israeli landscape from his window-side in bouquets of cyclamen, iris, lilac, mimosa and others, had the wars of the country reverberate in the blood-red color of the anemons.
Accordingly, opposed to the benign flowers, remains the anemone of grief and death (Adonis died on a bed of anemons), narcissus as a symbol of frigidity, and the bobbies as a symbol of indifference (or Jesus' blood). Even in the modern and post-modern age (as we sing "Where are all the flowers that we loved? and as we preserve the flowers by law of nature protection), despite all banalization of the flower painting (Zaritzky's vase flowers) - the flowers of death and life have continued to provoke each other. Andy Warhol has frozen them as huge wall paper, but they awoke to endless battles,. The eroticism of Georgia O'Keefs flowers, or the provoking - and-being-provoked sensuality of the flowers photographed by Robert Mapletorph found their answer in the morbid-dry flowers of Anselm Kiefer and the tragic cyclamen by Moshe Gershuni. In any case, flowers in art are never merely flowers: flowers are man, a frame of mind, a state of existence, an experience. Tova Berlinski, autumn flora of the 90's, is highly aware of this.
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Flowers by Tova.
1994
Especially the banal subject is important to me, because of its banality. It is by means of this very banality that I would like to express an important message, something that hurts. A flower, only a flower. Is this really all there is to it?
There are three aspects to my flower paintings: I was born in a small village, a place where flower growing and floral surroundings were part of daily life. And here I am continuing, growing flowers in my home - tulips, iris and others. I keep looking at them. I am fascinated by flowers. The flower is my surrounding. And the memory: my parents perished in the Holocaust. There is no grave of theirs in Oswiecim. As a matter of fact, the grave and the Memorial Day are of no importance to me. Man's life is a symbol in itself, not the grove. However, since my parents perished in such a humiliating and tragic way, I wish there were at least a gravestone. Then I could bring them those flowers that had always surrounded them. Yes, indeed, the very flower that I am growing and that I am painting is the flower that I would have taken to their graveside. And there is a third aspect which is connected to our political situation here: the death of young boys. I take these flowers to my parents, to my brothers (we were six brothers and sisters) and to the fallen . Through this banal subject, the painting of a flower, I express anger and pain. My flowers are angry and aggressive. I do not feel like painting a beautiful flower. If it looks beautiful then this is due to my natural artistic instinct "to beautify things". This may be the fourth aspect - the act of artistic creation - the isle of the known and the unknown in the painting, despite all the pain. Isn't there anything of the erotic flower? I don't believe, at least not on a conscious level, that my flowers carry an erotic message. There may be a hidden, underlying erotic aspect, which came to light unintentionally. I am aware of the flowers of art. I loved the flowers by Redon. I had never been much interested in flower paintings, neither by the Impressionists nor by Israeli artists. Despite all their beauty these paintings never did anything to me. Not so Redon and the Dutch School. The flower as an iconographic parchment of ecclesiastical art has always drawn my attention. And especially the lilies of "The Annunciation". I grew up surrounded by Christian art and culture and was deeply involved in it. "Cathedrals" - that's how call my large paintings, which are built like a tower out of three materials.
The magnification of the flower? It really started out as an adventure, from the experience to draw one bone one object on a big material and to let it speak for itself. Like the rocks and the trees I painted before. In the same way the big flower expresses "how much I had wanted to give them". But the big flower is also a flower of the sudden disruption. Sadly, disruption is the story of life.
The magnification of the flower? It really started out as an adventure, from the experience to draw one bone one object on a big material and to let it speak for itself. Like the rocks and the trees I painted before. In the same way the big flower expresses "how much I had wanted to give them". But the big flower is also a flower of the sudden disruption. Sadly, disruption is the story of life.
Usually man is born, grows up, studies, sets up a family - my life, however, has been marked by continuous disruptions: departure from home, partings... and, as I mentioned, I am not only turning to my parents and my brothers and sister, but also to the bitter reality of our life in this country - the reality of disruption of young lives. I always loved colorful iris and pansies. I grew them in Poland, they were given to me for my birthday and I grow them now in my garden in Jerusalem. These are no happy flowers. These flowers are drowned in sadness, as much as they are loaded with picturesque values, and most of all, the pansies, they are the "pensees " - the thoughts....
Tova Berlinski
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Bouquets of Lamentation
She has always been attached by flowers. Her cherished garden in the "German Neighbourhood" is a feast of flowering. The walls of her studio are covered by a flower of the "Chrysanthemum Exhibition" in the fall of 1928; she gathered leaves in New Jersey and they are also in her studio. Surrounded by flowers - live and dead ones. However, it is only for the past two years that she has taken to flower painting as such. She has wandered for decades in lyrical-melancholic landscapes where no actual flowers were visible, her abstract landscapes, full of scribblings, present memories of her childhood in Auschwitz, and the Polish nature has been absorbed into the Holocaust memories.
In 1977 she wrote " A great part of myself stayed there, with my beloved ones, who are no longer, with the fields, the forest, the river.." In the 70's the spirit of loss following the Yom-Kippur War troubled her colour spectrum which became a more introvert and quiet one. The underlying truth is that, in the course of her entire professional career, as of the 60's, she has painted flowers. Her scribblings were born in 1961 out of an entangled bush that she found at the shore of the Kinneret (which connected in her consciousness to the barbed wire of Auschwitz); later on the abstract paintings grew out her memory of the fields of the Polish village; her inclination towards violet and green reverberated the flowers that had been there.
During a talk with Ruth Debel in 1977 she admitted "....there is a great deal of green in Poland. Forests. The violet is in a specific bush in the forests. This bush also exists in Scotland on the mountain line. It is a national flower there. I have forgotten its name. It blossoms in the fall". An autumn flower. Around 1990 she appeared with a series of most impressive oil paintings of flat rocks accompanied by a German citation from Else Lasker-Schueler "furious of anger at everything and the entire world". No flower is blossoming in those landscapes. Dark earth, created by an infuriated brush, she has taken to the white and flat rocks as if they were gravestones gathered in silent familiarity. This is what remainders of Jewish gravestones in a Polish village look like. But they are black. However, big cypruses arose out of the rocks of Tova Berlinski, soft-brushed and disrupted cypresses, and those paved the way to the present flower. Meant to remind us of the flower bouquets in the cemetery paintings of Naphtali Bezern in the early 80's, shortly after the loss of his son. But, different from the ball-shaped dimensions of Bezem's flowers, the cypresses of Tova Berlinski grew upwards in a gothic-like and transcendentalist refinement. Like church pillars, like a prayer for the souls of the beloved ones. In one of the paintings of the series the disrupted vase was placed in the background of the earth of graves. From there on the bushes have been translated into iris, pansies, estranged from earth and any other "place". Flowers that were picked. Flowers disrupted from the earth and entered the artist's home for a limited period of time. As for a farewell, not to say burial. Disrupted lives, the lives of her beloved ones, her own life. Their head is slightly bowed. Always disrupted, orange, missing. They are shut in secret and insoluble enigma, or opened as if the artist were to penetrate into the depths of a sunken and insoluble space. Painted by caressing (even the slightly picking leaves of the tulips are caressed by the brush). Despite all the anger, the caress is loving. Brush-caresses continuing to fill and overflow the entire background, which is always open and always undefined. As if those flowers were painted outside of the context of time and space, and as if the space were open and enigmatic. Soft and wild pieces at the same time, interweave acceptance and wounds which refuse to heal. The pansies as restrained flames, the violet as volcanic outburst which is softened lyrically: always flowing, always floating and overflowing the painting and going beyond. And there is always the picturesque aspect of the painting: flat, tightly stretched between its contrasts of nuances, playing on brush strings, flowing in musical streams of color and dynamics, building vigorous spots from the nurturing of silent and short touchings. And, once again, we wander from the painting to the memories: the ego of the painter silently uttering , reaching out for the corporeity of the flower, for a lost substance, for an existence that has been is gone forever. Families. Families of flowers, families of paintings. They are pressed together tightly in a vase. fearful as on a day of a pogrom, one about to perish. They are shoved together in the corner of the canvas as if hiding away. The big canvases appear in couples, triplets or quadruplets. Always families. Always together and yet alone. Always in morning, head bent, and blossoming simultaneously.
Despite death - we are alive. They appear in couples, flower by flower, like man and woman: head, body, shoulders. All of a sudden the shoulders, the long leaves, appear like wings, and maybe these are the hands waving good-bye...
Despite all this, they are full of sensuality, and their presence is organic, as organs of fertility, trembling with excitement. However, the restraint, the self-control and the culture, implied in the accepting attitude reached by age, are carrying forward, and withholding the brush strokes from anger, withholding all dionysian outburst. They won't let these paintings turn into sentimental ones, despite all the rich colorfulness. Grief has sunken on these canvases: in the greyness of the background, in the darkening condensation of the pallet of flowers and vases. These flowers are lyrical memorials: these flowers of the most intimate idiosyncrasies are assertions of home and homeliness achieved after the ultimate loss of home.
Gideon Ofrat
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